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Stranded in orbit, with no way home before the air runs out… A veteran pilot flying a revolutionary spaceplane, A media mogul on an urgent mission halfway around the world, And an aerospace legend fighting to save his legacy, in the face of a government that would stand aside to let it be destroyed. At hypersonic speed, Arthur Hammond’s fleet of Clipper spaceplanes has become the premium choice for high-flying travel, placing every corner of the globe within a few hours’ reach. But when the line’s flagship is marooned in space with a load of VIP clients, its crew must fight to stay alive knowing that help may never arrive. As they struggle with failing life support and increasingly desperate passengers, their colleagues back on Earth scramble to mount an audacious rescue. A contentious mix of old airline hands and NASA veterans, they will face shocking betrayals in a battle to save their friends. In this race against time, Hammond must confront an onslaught of horrendous press, nitpicking bureaucrats, and dubious financiers – all of them pawns in a larger game, with his business empire as the prize. Amid a spreading web of industrial espionage, he may find the truth to be worse than imagined. And in space, one man will discover that escape may demand a terrible sacrifice. Reviewers have called it "a real barn-burner" and "the best darned 'sci-fi' novel I've read in years." PERIGEE opens the next chapter in air and space travel, where ordinary people will accomplish extraordinary things.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Chiles has been fascinated by airplanes, rockets, and spaceflight ever since he was a little kid growing up in South Carolina. Fascination morphed into obsession when he witnessed the final Apollo/Saturn launches in person. How he ended up as an English major in college is still a mystery, though he managed to overcome this self-inflicted handicap to pursue a career in aviation. He is a graduate of The Citadel, a Marine Corps veteran, and is licensed as a private pilot and airline dispatcher. In addition to his novels, he has written for aviation magazines including Smithsonian's Air & Space. He resides in Ohio as an expatriate Southerner with his wife and sons, two lethargic dachshunds, and a bovine cat.

Top customer reviews

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If you love airplanes, spacecraft, orbiting stations and stories that have to do with NASA, you must read this book.I bought it simply because I liked the cover and the title. That sort of airplane that I later found out to be a spaceplane (a plane that works both in the atmosphere and in space), lost in orbit, which seemed to be in trouble, made me immediately portend an interesting story. And I was not disappointed.The plot of this techno-thriller is intriguing. It is set in a future when spaceplanes are used to travel between two antipodal points on Earth. These aircrafts, called clippers, have a drive that can almost bring them to orbit, drawing a parabolic trajectory, and then down to the final destination, which is reached in a few hours. During the journey, a very expensive one, the passengers feel the sensation of weightlessness for a short period of time, in which the clipper is in free fall.The author, Patrick Chiles, is a pilot, has made several works in the field of aviation and has written numerous articles in magazines which deal with space flight. In short, he is an expert, both for the technical and the human part concerning flight and space. Reading his book, all this appears obvious. The pace of the story is compelling, the dialogue is well-orchestrated and you are given the impression to find yourselves there on the clipper or in the mission control or on the space station. New emotions are always around the corner, making the reading fun as well as instructive. It is actually characterized by a good balance between the technical part and fiction, which ensures credibility. It is a pity that such books do not arrive to the Italian market, because there would really be the need for them. This book is one of many examples of good value products written by independent authors.If I had to define it with a word, it would be thrilling, under all points of view. Read it.

A true space adventure that could become reality in the near future. Best part for me was the incredibly creative people who work in the aerospace field. Not only creatives who can imagine the unimaginable but are intelligent enough to make it a reality. It also shows the inflexibility of government programs that limit our full potential. Really entertaining.

I grabbed this book for free during yesterday's promotion after I saw a link on Instapundit and read it on my iPhone kindle app.

I'm a space buff and wasn't expecting much story, either something realistic and technical and a bit cardboard like "The Rocket Company," or on the other side, something Sci Fi with a human story line but wildly improbable.

To my suprise, it was a plain great story and great read. I didn't put it down until I finished it. It's barely sci-fi because it's not only plausible but realistic about what is achieveable. The story revolves around a Skylon-type suborbital transport that has a throttle problem and ends up stuck in orbit with no way back down to earth.

But the characters involved are like real people with real concerns and human frailties. And as a fomer Navy submariner who has worked closely with two military astronauts, I gotta say he has military astronaut-personality types to a 'T'. (Although he paints submariners as a bit more like Marines than they actually are. Figures for a Jarhead.)

This is the first scifi book I've read in a while that presented heros that don't fall into the standard scifi/AynRand polar tropes of either repressive Christianist morons or Superman Engineer Libertairan heros. I enjoyed it.

Great new SF. Set in a very near future where private industry has taken up the challenge of putting mankind in space. Spaceplanes in ballistic trajectories make continent to continent flight fast and safe until something goes wrong and one of the planes ends up in orbit with no way to get it back. Edge of the seat (I know, it's a cliche) and believable characters. Highly recommended and hoping that Chiles continues.

I liked this book fairly well. I found the story to be fascinating and the author clearly knows a thing or two about being a pilot. The flight scenes and emotions & flight action felt real and kept you on edge at the right moments. My problem with Perigee was two fold. First - many of the characters felt flat to me. Sort of like card board cutouts. I don't mind that with periphereal or bit players, but the three or four leads in the story need to be folks the reader can care about and I just did not care whether any of them lived or died. Second - there a number of scenes that could just be deleted from the book entirely and not take away from the overall story at all. I found I skipped three or four pages at a time without missing anything. I finsihed the book and enjoyed well enough that I will check out other stuff by this author in the future.

I liked it and the only reason it didn't get a higher rating from me is I'm technologically incompetent and get annoyed at myself for feeling lost with it. The author is obviously very well grounded in the technology and writes very believably about the near-future technology.

It should appeal to hard sci-fi fans, though it may be a bit slow paced for the action/adventure readers. I would have liked to see more character development, more sense of individualism and a little more expansion of the sabotage/espionage plot angle but those things are, again, a personal preference.

Overall, a well written and an enjoyable entry in the hard sci-fi genre and an interesting look at the possible issues that could be involved in commercial 'space travel'.